Category Archives: Human Potential

Parental Lesson #1: Talk to Your Children

Could the key to your child’s success be as simple as talking to them? Could our educational and probably cognitive decline be at least in part attributable to less and less quality time that permits parents to simply talk to their children? I believe that the foundation of cognition–the ability to think, hold pieces of information together, and manipulate information–is based on auditory processing. Decades of measuring the processing abilities in children and adults as well as developing tools to help develop processing skills has demonstrated tens of thousands of times that your complexity of thought is built upon and limited to how much auditory information you can process and manipulate. We all have the potential to do better; we all have the ability to do better; we just need the opportunity to do better.

 

Related Links:

The NACD Simply Smarter Project

Simply Smarter Kids: Memory

The Simply Smarter System: Video Teaser

 

Related Articles:

TSI – Auditory Processing: What is It?

NACD Journal – Parenting 101: A Child’s Education Begins with Educating the Parents

 

Learning Isn’t Tough

Learning isn’t tough. It actually can and should be fun and easy. It never ceases to amaze me how our schools can take learning, which can be so much fun and comes quite naturally to all of us, and make it all so very difficult, so painful, and fail so many of our children in the process.

I just saw one of our families who came out to Utah for their two “typical” girls to go skiing on the “best snow on Earth” and to get their evaluations and new programs. Both parents work full time and manage the girls and their short programs as they can. Both of the girls have been doing program since they were about two months old. The girls showed me their stuff at their evaluations, and both are doing very well; but big sister GiGi really showed off. GiGi had an auditory digit span of 5, and her reading tested out at the level of the average child in the nation in the middle of third grade. She has excellent language skills, is quite conversational, bilingual, and was skiing independently on her first day ever on the slopes. GiGi, during her little sister’s eval, sat quietly and read to herself, quite the mature young lady. All and all a great child whose little sister isn’t going to let her get too far ahead. One other rather significant piece of data in the equation is that GiGi is only three years old!

I also just received an email from Lyn Waldeck, one of our evaluators based outside of Dallas. Lyn has raised and home schooled five boys, while working with/for NACD since 1993. Lyn’s boys have all done exceptionally well, and she and all of us at NACD are very proud of all of them. Today’s news was that Grant, Lyn’s youngest, will be starting college classes this fall at fourteen! Grant attended school this year for his first and only school experience so he could get his feet wet in a classroom before taking college classes. He will be attending a really cool STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) school and will be off and running, chasing after his very successful big brothers.

We have seen many of our NACD kids enter college at fourteen and go on to have very successful college experiences and excel in their professions. Learning isn’t tough, but school often is. Someday we might succeed in fixing our very broken educational system, but in the meantime, parents, you had better take charge. Whether your child attends school or not, parents still need to assume the primary responsibility for their child’s education, and, of course, a little NACD program and guidance never hurts.

We are really proud of all of our exceptional children and their exceptional parents.

Related links:

“Raising Expectations”
NACD Guide to Child Development & Education – NACD Bookstore

Teaching Your Child To Think – From the Brilliant Baby Series

What is preventing you or your children from achieving your potential? Often at the top of the list is simply the ability to take in information (short-term memory), manipulate information (working memory), and to think (executive function). Many teachers are just talking to themselves because their students can’t process what is being said. In this video I also mention that The NACD Foundation’s Simply Smarter Project is working to help people understand how well they “think” and is teaching them how to do it better. You and your children can go online and take a quick test and find out how you are doing. Don’t be scared; you can learn to do it better.

Politicians and Educators: Wake Up and Stop Screwing Up Our Kids

58I finished my day today with a really terrific family. Three months ago I saw their nine-year-old daughter, Mandy, for the first time; today was their first revisit. Mandy’s parents brought her to us because of a plethora of issues, including a full range of academic problems and memory issues, being fearful and distractible, having fine motor, gross motor, and coordination concerns, avoidance behaviors, difficulty with peers, sensitivity to sounds, tics, etc.–a fairly typical mixed bag of issues.

Today I saw a new Mandy. After three months of home program/home school, Mandy advanced a full academic grade level. Her short-term memory, working memory, and executive function has moved from being of significant concern to being “typical” and should continue to move forward; her motor skills have improved; she is much more confident and tolerates the noisy world much better. These are outcomes that we tend to expect. But because of the changes Mandy’s parents have seen in her, they both decided to come in themselves for assessments and programs.

Both of these parents are smart, great people, and although they are both about 40, neither has really recovered from the experience of school.They both have issues and baggage, largely created by the school/educational experience, issues that they have been carrying around and trying (largely unsuccessfully) to cope with since their days in school. Both have poor self-esteem, are insecure, and are a reflection of our educational system–a system that, rather than helping all of us unique individuals succeed, has done an absolutely incredible job of ignoring a basic fact that we actually have brains and that there are these wonderful things called “potential” and“brain plasticity.”Neuro/brain plasticity is an innate brain function that is basic to who and what we are and what we can be, as is breathing.Brain plasticity is not a new concept or new information. It has been acknowledged since the late 1800s.It has been at the foundation of our work at NACD since the organization’s inception in the late ‘70s. So how can it be that our educational system is and has been focused on curriculum and not building and developing brains and unique individuals? The system still maintains a “the-more-we-throw-at-them-the-more-we-hope-sticks” educational model, believing that to achieve better outcomes they just need more hours per day and days per year to throw more crap at students. Then the mindset appears to be: “It’s not working, so lets’ do more of it, and let’s throw a couple of hours of useless homework on top just to make sure that the majority of kids not only don’t really learn anything, but let’s teach them to really hate learning everything and teach them that they are broken in the process.”

We all have incredible potential. Those in control of public and most private education need to forget about coming up with another 1000 reading and math programs, throwing out more books and replacing them with modifications of what they have just thrown out. Forget about throwing more random crap at kids with the hope that some of it will stick. Stop taking kids who love learning and teaching them to hate learning anything. Please acknowledge that we are all amazing and unique individuals with incredible potential. Please stop trying to fit us all into a narrow model and calling us diseased (LD, ADD, ADHD, dyslexic , Asperger’s, etc.) if we don’t fit their perception of who and what we should be and with a little attention to just the basics of developing brains and turning kids on to learning, we can change their futures and our future.

Mandy is just getting started. She’s going to be a happy, confident star, as most of our children could and should be, and her brave parents are going to learn that they are actually quite smart and that it isn’t too late for them to raise the bar and achieve, feel good about themselves, and be great.

Related links:

The NACD Simply Smarter Project – http://www.nacdtheproject.com/
The Learning Environment by Robert J. Doman Jr. – http://www.nacd.org/journal/article16.php
NACD Education Video Series – http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDC00943D1D09709A

Unlocking the Potential – From the Brilliant Baby Series

How do we help our children achieve? How do we move beyond labels, particularly that of just being “typical/average,” to really make our children successful? Neuroplasticity–how our brains are stimulated and used determines how they become wired. Brains change. We need to make sure they change in good ways. We can build on strengths and identify inefficiencies or weaknesses, provide a child with appropriate input/stimulation, and change their brain. How cool is that?